Nikkisa Abdollahi

Designer.

Community
Organizer.

Possibilitarian.

She began her career as a graffiti artist at the tender age of four, perhaps earlier
than some and surely later than others. Using her mother's favorite lipstick, she
took to her neighbor's bedroom wall to showcase her first work of art. Like many
many other misunderstood graffiti artists before her, the young girl’s art was savagely
washed off without regard to its intended statement.

Not a year passed before she chose her grandmother's blanket as her favored
tableau. This too, was met not with joy, but with horror and disgust. (Years later,
as a daughter-in-law, she can appreciate her mother's embarrassment at this
deed.) Needless to say, her benefactor chose not to celebrate “the work"; no
Polaroids were snapped to commemorate these first attempts at self-expression.
These two episodes were vague memories and rely mostly on her mother's
perturbed recollections, but one event single-handedly rescued the girl’s artistic
ambitions and gave her the courage to believe in her talent. It also happened to
be her third and last act of using the public domain as her canvas.

A lonely first grader uprooted from pre-revolutionary Iran to Oklahoma, she had
no friends to confide in yet, so she chose a small, laminated wood-grain desk for
self-expression. To all bystanders, it was but a blip in a day, but in her world a
small inner revolution was about to manifest within her.

A self-portrait, her sketch occupied roughly one-fifth of the area of her desktop.
When her teacher saw the handiwork, her immediate response was to tell the
girl to wash it off. But before she had a chance to sigh in defeat, the benevolent
teacher took a pause and said, "Well, let's just keep it for a few days. But next
time, use a piece of paper" and continued to turn a blind eye to perhaps the
world's most primitive "desktop wallpaper".

Each day for two weeks the girl would anxiously walk into the classroom to see
if her alter-ego had survived another night from the fate of janitorial services.
Like all graffiti, her work did eventually meet it's doom, but not before it served
to shore up much needed confidence in her abilities. Of course, no photos were
taken of this, her first memory of success. Nevertheless, the image remains,
archived in HD in her inner cache.

Decades later, she continues to enjoy and appreciate art in all its various forms
and quietly rejoices each time she witnesses it, imagining all the back stories.
Today, her tag is of a different sort: interior design, graphic design and community
organizing. She still enjoys painting on blankets, putting her signature on
couches and t-shirts, and taking snapshots of meaningful connections. And if you
wait around long enough, you may even find her dabbling on desktops.